Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts is presented as the definitive recorded portrait of Dr. Charles Joseph Smith, and for once that overused word feels earned. Born on Chicago’s South Side in 1970 and a lifelong resident of Beverly, Smith is both a conservatory‑trained concert pianist and a tireless DIY presence, the kind of figure who has long been central to the city’s cultural life while remaining almost entirely undocumented in the wider world. Over two LPs or three CDs, this set gathers 30 years of his self‑released music - originally sold by hand at local shows or pressed in tiny runs - and makes it widely available for the first time. It is also the inaugural archival project from Sooper Records, and it lands like a manifesto: Chicago’s history is not only in the canons, but in the homemade discs carried in backpacks and plastic bags from gig to gig.
Smith’s biography would be remarkable even without the music. A mute child who found his primary form of communication at the piano, he pursued that gift with monastic focus, eventually earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in the instrument and performing as a concert pianist across the USA, Italy, Germany, France and Hungary. He recounts that path in his self‑published autobiography, The 88 Keys that Opened Doors, where he describes how music became both life practice and survival strategy in the face of Autism Spectrum Disorder. That sense of music as a literal key - to self‑expression, to community, to possibility - runs through everything here. You can hear it in the intensity of the solo piano works, in the way even the rougher, lo‑fi tracks are driven by an unembarrassed desire to connect.
Stylistically, the collection is deliberately broad, reflecting a compositional voice that has metabolised an entire city’s worth of sound. There are virtuosic concert pieces that bear the imprint of both church and conservatory: gospel‑inflected cadences, Romantic surges, modernist side‑steps, all filtered through a touch that can pivot from thunderous octaves to crystalline, bell‑like lines in a heartbeat. Electroacoustic experiments place prepared piano, environmental sound and electronic processing in uneasy, fascinating dialogue, while beat‑driven tracks reveal an ear tuned to pop, hip‑hop and house, refracted through his idiosyncratic harmony. Free improvisations sit at the centre of this web, documenting Smith thinking aloud at the keyboard in a way that ties the other strands together: the church, the recital hall, the dancefloor and the basement show all flicker through his fingers.
Anchoring the set conceptually are two instrumental sketches from Smith’s long‑running sci‑fi opera War of the Martian Ghosts: a 2018 realisation for solo piano and a 2023 electronic version. The opera serves as a kind of personal mythos, a space where science fiction, spiritual struggle and Black speculative imagination intersect. In piano form, its themes are dramatic, almost cinematic: stormy left‑hand ostinati, sudden shifts to fragile lyricism, narrative arcs implied in modulation and tempo. The electronic take translates those motifs into a different cosmos of drum machines, synths and sampled textures, suggesting late‑night pirate transmissions from an alternate Chicago. Together, they show how Smith uses genre and story not as costume, but as scaffolding for deeper questions about power, survival and transcendence.
The physical edition underlines the archival weight of the project. Packaged as a double vinyl or triple CD collector’s set, it comes with an extensive insert booklet of around 9,000 words: poetry, interviews, quotes, thirty archival photographs, and long‑form liner notes on Smith’s life and work by Sooper co‑founder Glenn Curran, edited by Sadie Dupuis. That context matters. It traces his path from church musician to international concert performer to mainstay of Chicago’s experimental underground, and it documents decades of small‑scale, face‑to‑face labour: performing, dancing, selling self‑published music and books in person at the shows he attends, embodying the community‑building ethos that animates the city’s DIY culture.
Taken as a whole, Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts is less a greatest‑hits package than a cartography of a singular creative life. It shows how an artist shaped by gospel, jazz, pop, classical composition, modern dance scores and rule‑breaking noise scenes has woven those influences into something that doesn’t quite resemble any of them. It acknowledges that no single release can capture the full expanse of Dr. Charles Joseph Smith’s output - the “galaxies of music, poetry and prose” he continues to generate - but it offers a crucial, tangible starting point. For Chicago, it’s a piece of living music history finally etched into durable form; for everyone else, it’s an invitation to step into a universe that has been humming along just out of earshot, waiting for you to tune in
